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I saw "Brazil 3, Panama 2" and was wondering why we had a thread about soccer World Cup qualifiers. Then I thought, "I'm kinda surprised that Panama kept it that close." Then I realized what this was really about and I thought, "WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF"

I get the feeling that that'll be it for Brazil, though. They used all of their good pitchers last night, probably. Of course, that was something of the point: they wanted to prove they belonged by winning a game, and they have shown that. Anything after this will be icing on the cake. It'll be interesting to see how Brazil develops in the coming years as MLB and some Japan teams start to tap into it more.

I mean, consider: it's a large country where a lot of people play sports. If you could convince even a small portion of good-but-not-great Brazilian athletes people that they have a better chance of being Yan Gomes than they ever would have of becoming Kaka or Neymar or whoever, it'd be a great source of talent.

Sort of like how Australia has provided a good number of ballplayers who are good athletes but just aren't elite players in Australia's more popular sports, and how Canada has provided plenty of players to MLB who just weren't very good at Hockey, or who realized their ceiling in baseball was higher than in hockey.